Kerry Washington Reveals The Impact Her Sexual Assault Experience Had On Her Life

Imagine being sexually assaulted only to be told by the perpetrator that it never happened and that it was all in your imagination. Such an experience will be too much for anyone to handle and that was exactly what happened to “Scandal” actress Kerry Washington.

Already, the star of “Unprisoned” wrote in her memoir “Thicker Than Water” published in September 2023 that she experienced sexual abuse growing up.

On Saturday, April 20, the actress attended the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books Event at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles where she was asked by Erica D. Smith to share how such experience helped shape her life.

According to Kerry, that experience was one out of many instances where the truth was withheld from her. Her statement was a reference to a part of her book where she shared that she only found out that her father Earl Washington wasn’t her biological father in 2018 when she was around 41 years so imagine living over four decades of your life in ignorance.

Kerry Washington — How Did The Experience Shape Kerry?

Speaking to Erica, Kerry explained, “The version of the story that I want to tell is the version of figuring out the truth of who I am and what were the obstacles that got in the way of me being able to know my truth and experience my truth,” she added, “And one of those things was that I had survived this sexual assault that was happening at night.”

The “The School For Good And Evil” actress went on to explain why she included that part of her life in the memoir, “And why it was relevant to the story is because of the ways that I was gaslit that I didn’t know that something, I didn’t know what was happening at night, but I knew that something was happening.”

According to Kerry, the incidents always took place every time she attended sleepovers as a child in the Bronx, and someone from the neighborhood would always touch her at night. While the 47-year-old didn’t mention who the offender was, it could easily be deduced that he was much older but she clarified that “He was not a pedophile.”

She went on to detail what happened when she confronted the culprit, “When I approached the person who was doing it, he told me that it was in my imagination and that I didn’t know what I was talking about and that I was crazy. And that became a framework that I found myself fighting against a lot of my life, that if I had an instinctive thought about something, an intuitive idea about something, there was another thread of messaging in my brain that said, ‘You’re crazy. You don’t know what you’re talking about. That’s not really true.'”

She continued, “And so that’s what I feel like I’ve spent a lot of my life trying to beat back — the messaging that I don’t know my own truth,” while maintaining, “The truth remains that there were things done to me — while I was sleeping, and without my consent — but the perpetrator was a child himself. It is partly my compassion for him that has kept these incidents a secret, locked in the vault of my mind.”

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